The knockoff genre is an imitation of Hollywood blockbusters that grab for a piece of enormous box office sales, wherein films parasitically apply elements found in original blockbusters on a less perfectionist scale: limited budget, B-list actors and poorly fabricated special effects. Counterfeits and hybrids are surreally aware of the symbolic terms in this game of snakes and ladders that we play as inhabitants of a Western democracy.

Unlike the “real” products that promise an authentic experience of material success, these ersatz counterparts are complicit; our comrades in status-deception. Like status anxiety itself, authentic desirableness are the cultural products—regardless of where they are actually manufactured—of a more or less Western, “free” consumer society; the objects that approximate them, meanwhile, are by and large devised in social contexts that do not necessarily fall under the jurisdiction of the democratic.

Finding the imperfection and creative freedom hidden under law-infringing Hollywood B-rate production is very similar to production of counterfeit consumer goods as a source of inspiration. The performance narrative follows capitalist commodity fetish ‘chopped and screwed’ through different forms of brands to entertainment industry.